Today's educational processes have been affected by new technologies. This makes students feel very bored when they attend classes taught under the traditional modality of a classroom with the blackboard and the teacher. Simply a teacher cannot compete in that way with the multimedia technologies to which students have access through the Internet, their mobile devices, their computers, cable television, among other means.
On the other hand, the old model of many people attending a classroom where the teacher is present implies many inconveniences today, which is increased for professional training (professional improvement courses, postgraduate courses, among others), where students have multiple occupations, with different schedules, in different geographic regions and with different financing possibilities.
In turn, for the teacher facilitators of the training, having to travel continuously to different cities to be able to give the training workshops represents a great physical exhaustion, coupled with the travel costs and per diem that this implies.
Fortunately, today there are technological tools that make it possible to bring the classroom to an online environment using the Internet. This is known as Virtual Classrooms and is part of eLearning, which is nothing more than transferring the Teaching-Learning process to Internet portals which are accessed with a username and password (depending on the regulations of each institution or training company /training).
Virtual Classrooms must allow the handling of various types of materials and resources online. In turn, the courses to be taught must comply with a programmatic content and an adequate instructional design to guarantee the learning process.
Among the materials that should be able to be used in a Virtual Classroom are the web pages with their own content of the topics covered, enriched with graphics, images, audios and / or videos. These internal pages of the course are inserted into Chapters or Modules structured according to what is required for the sequence of instructional design. These modules are enabled for students as the course progresses and are managed by the facilitator or instructor who moderates the course online.
Traditional electronic materials can also be used, that is, PowerPoint presentations, text documents or PDF format.
The most recommended nowadays regarding the materials is to make use of Demonstrative Videos accompanied with Mind Maps, which can be complemented with bibliographic material for future reference.
As for online resources, they must allow the interaction of students both with the facilitator and with their classmates. This interaction can take place synchronously (in real time) or asynchronously (at the moment when everyone can do it). Among the existing resources to interact synchronously are Video-Conferences (or webinars) and Chats (written or by audio). In the case of asynchronous resources, discussion forums, surveys, questionnaires or exams, workshops, homework or assignments (which involve uploading deliverables) or other interactive applications stand out.
In the Virtual Classroom environment, there should be other tools such as the calendar of activities that reflect the dates / times in which the exams will be held, video-conferences, chats, registration, among others.
The evaluations can be carried out through the different resources available, both in the exams and by participating in the forums, tasks or workshops (individual or group). These evaluations can be automated and displayed on a virtual billboard where all participants can be informed of their own progress.
Professional training centers, university extension houses, company departments that require periodic certification of their employees according to their functional activities, are suitable candidates to have what is known as a Virtual Campus.
The Virtual Campus must be made up of three axes. The first is the Academic Axis, made up of the Courses arranged in the Virtual Classrooms and where the students and their facilitators actively participate. The second is the Administrative Axis, which must guarantee control of access to the Virtual Classrooms through permits obtained based, for example, on periodic payments from students. For this, it is very useful that the Administrative Axis has a System of Account Statements and Online Payments with the connection to the administrative system of the institution and to the banks to make payments by deposits, transfers or using credit cards (in local currency or in international currencies).The third is the Technological Axis that must be made up of the server platform that handle all the necessary software for the first two axes, as well as the disk space for virtual classrooms and the bandwidth for the traffic that all this implies, including but not limited to the use of emails.
An institution such as the aforementioned must also have an Educational Portal in which it presents all the information related to its activities as well as the catalog of its portfolio of courses, schedules, programming, among other multiple information that all the actors of the eLearning scene require..
This makes us see that eLearning is not limited exclusively to large national and international universities, but is also ideal for professional training companies or for all types of companies that, due to their business model, require training and / or certification (and recertify) your staff who are typically located in various geographic regions. In turn, it allows those who teach courses to be able to take their training to users (clients) anywhere on our planet.
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